Heard around the West

Could a man juggle 20
drinks sliding around a tray while walking
in spike heels and looking sexy? Some cocktail waitresses in Reno,
Nev., do that for eight hours at a time. They also say they're sick
and tired of it - the blisters, bunions and hammer toes caused by
wearing high heels on the job. So they've started a campaign to
tell the gambling industry that mandatory heel height is
discriminatory and puts women's health in jeopardy, reports
Associated Press. About 40 women kicked off their pumps - and their
crusade - recently, at a demonstration in downtown Reno. They
tossed their high heels into a pile and turned on a smoke machine
to symbolize a fire. Kricket Martinez, a casino waitress who
coordinates the campaign, told demonstrators: "We want some
respect, we want some dignity and we want them - the casino bosses
- to kiss our feet!" The Kiss My Foot campaign, as the cocktail
waitresses have dubbed it, plans to take its protest on the road -
next stop, Las Vegas. Supporters include the Alliance for Workers'
Rights and Nevada Empowered Women's Project.

You know you're suffering a New West
attack when the pizza arrives in a $40,000
car. In Cody, Wyo., recently, photographer Dewey Vanderhoff was
looking out his window when he saw the familiar Domino's Pizza
flag. Carrying the flag - a new giant sport utility vehicle. The
driver was still a high school kid, he adds, but he wonders: Was
she working her way through prep school? The usual pizza delivery
vehicle, he says, looks like a reject from the high-school shop
class.

Someone
said that you know you're an adult when you
can hold two conflicting ideas in your mind and believe both
without feeling like a hypocrite. That describes the Ford Motor
Co., to a Model T. Ford admitted to shareholders in Atlanta, Ga.,
recently that its sport utility vehicles are dangerous to small
cars, chug gas and are environmentally unfriendly. At the same
time, shareholders were told that SUVs brought in record profits of
$7.2 billion last year, with some models carrying profit margins of
nearly $15,000. The car maker said it was trying to become more
"transparent" about the environmental problems it faces. "But
William Clay Ford Jr., Ford chairman, and Jac Nasser, the company's
president and CEO, said the company would continue to build and
market SUVs to meet customer demand," AP
reports.

"Pet
owner" is becoming an obsolete term in
Boulder, Colo. Like San Francisco and Marin County, Calif., Boulder
is moving toward changing all references of pet owner to "pet
guardian," reports The Denver Post.
Animal-rights advocates say the language shift will encourage
residents to see their dogs and cats as family members, instead of
chairs or appliances. "It's all part of an effort to elevate the
status of animals from property to individuals," says Jan McHugh,
head of the Humane Society of Boulder Valley. Boulder's city
council decides next month whether the term pet owner bites the
dust.

Prize-bearing cockroaches are still prowling
14 cities in America, including Portland,
Ore., where a contest sponsor talked about the angst of gluing a
bar code to a roach's belly. The bar code ensures the lucky finder
a new Volkswagen bug or $1 million. Robert McMaster of Halt Pest
Control in Beaverton, Ore., says the 25 or so roaches selected for
scurrying in his city had to be cooled down to slow them down, then
held still while a special glue was applied to their abdomens. The
glue held the bar codes fast. "It's really hard to do," McMaster
complained to Willamette Week. "I never want to
do that again." Does he ever feel sorry about exterminating
hundreds of thousands of the animals that frequent damp, dark
places? "They're invasive, nasty creatures," he says. "Their sheer
numbers are an aesthetic concern! You can be easily overwhelmed.
No, I hate cockroaches!'

America's military never
disappoints. There must be nothing it has
not thought of - including using the moon as a stage set for
showing off. A 72-year-old physicist recently spilled the beans in
a letter to the journal Nature about our wanting to bomb the moon.
Leonard Reiffel said that in 1958, he led a team of 10 people,
including the late astronomer Carl Sagan, in planning the feat. The
bomb would be similar in power to the one that devastated
Hiroshima, and Reiffel said the nuclear flash would show the Soviet
Union that we had enough atomic chutzpah to respond to an attack.
The Russians had launched their satellite Sputnik in 1957, and the
United States' best effort in 1958 mustered only a puny satellite
weighing 10.5 pounds. The Air Force effort, centered in
Albuquerque, N.M., didn't waste too much time on the moonglow
scheme, Reiffel said. It was abandoned within a
year.

Julia
Butterfly Hill came down from her tree, but
up in Eureka, Calif., Nate Madsen is still living in an ancient
redwood 170 feet off the ground. He calls the tree Mariah, and he
says he won't leave her until Maxxam's Pacific Lumber grants the
tree and its grove clemency, reports Eco-News.
Madsen has descended to the ground a few days every month but
skipped his graduation from Humboldt State University last month to
guard his perch. Madsen used to work as a brewer, where -
ironically - he was represented by the International Woodworkers
Union. While tree-sitting, he kept up with college courses by using
a laptop computer.